Transport & fleet

Fleet Inspection Mobile Suite

Daily walk-around vehicle checks that produce regulator-grade records — offline in the yard, with defects escalated straight to a mechanic's queue.

Scale
Medium
Platforms
iOS · Android · Web
Capabilities
Mobile · Automation · B2B

The record is the product

Daily walk-around checks are a legal obligation across most commercial fleets — and in practice they degrade into a signature on a clipboard at 05:40 in the rain. The paper satisfies no one: drivers resent it, defects surface as breakdowns, and when an incident investigation asks “was this checked?”, the operator’s evidence is a tick box anyone could have filled from the cab. The concept starts from the end state — a record a regulator, insurer, or investigator would accept — and works backwards to a check a driver will actually perform.

Designed for the yard, not the demo

  • Fully offline: yards, underground depots, and rural stops have no signal; every check completes locally and syncs later, with capture time as the fact of record
  • Gloves-and-rain UX: large targets, ordered around the physical walk, sub-five-minute design budget for a clean check
  • Anti-pencil-whipping by design rather than accusation: item order randomizes within zones, selected items request a photo, and a check completed implausibly fast is flagged for the supervisor — visible policy, applied to everyone
  • Vehicle-specific checklists: a tail-lift, a reefer unit, or an ADR trailer changes what must be checked, automatically

From defect to decision

Walk-around to release
  1. Driver walks the vehicle guided check, offline, photos on demand
  2. Defect flagged location on vehicle, severity, photo
  3. Escalation rules run safety-critical vs. monitor-and-schedule
  4. Mechanic queue updated work order drafted with parts context
  5. Supervisor decides release, restrict, or ground — named sign-off
  6. Record sealed immutable, inspection-ready, exportable

Automation moves information: a brake defect reaches the workshop queue with photos and vehicle history before the driver reaches the office, and routine items are batched into scheduled maintenance instead of being re-reported daily. What automation never does is decide roadworthiness. Grounding a vehicle costs revenue; releasing one costs more if the rules were wrong. Both outcomes carry a person’s name, and the system’s job is to make that person fast and well-informed, not absent.

The compliance spine

Records are append-only and versioned: who checked, when, where, what was found, what was decided, and by whom. Corrections annotate; they never overwrite. Export produces the formats the audience already accepts — inspection histories per vehicle, defect logs per period — because a compliance tool that requires the auditor to learn new software has misunderstood its user.

Prototype scope

One fleet profile (rigid trucks, one depot), the offline check, defect escalation into a simple workshop queue, and the sealed record with export. Telematics integration and predictive signals belong to a later phase — and to a different product conversation.

Evaluation plan

  • Check integrity: distribution of completion times before and after rollout — the disappearance of 40-second checks is the honest adoption signal
  • Defect latency: time from flag to workshop awareness, against a same-shift budget
  • Sign-off quality: rate at which supervisors override escalation severity in either direction, reviewed monthly as calibration data for the rules
  • Audit rehearsal: a mock regulator inspection using only the system’s exports, scored by someone who has sat through the real thing

Facing a similar problem for real?

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